If you're building a Bishop/Fortress engine, it seems like using the occasional Fortress as a Village makes more sense than messing around with Lost Arts as a way of getting +Action?

Depends. Lost arts is one gain and you are done. This is particularly helpful if you viable draw. Something like 4 Smithies, 5 Forts, 8 Bish becomes viable. This can allow for more total VP to beat out things like a Dominate engine. Likewise, being able to admix draw in becomes vastly better if you are looking at attacks like Militia, Ambassador, or the fake attack of Masq passing you are card and having to send over a Fort. Being able to trash 4 times is awfully hard if you only have actions for trashing.

It is really not much different than buying non-Fort villages. Definitely worth doing some of the time, but may not be possible while you race for key components (e.g. Fort or Bish).

Crown, Highway, and Sculptor. You can easily pile things out QUICKLY. It didn't take me long in this game to get a Highway in play, then a crowned Sculptor. From there, you can gain Crown to your hand, gaining a villager, and gain another Sculptor, then use the villager to play your new Crown on your new Sculptor, then rinse and repeat until those piles are empty. At this point I had a lead so the pile control was nice.

Crown, Highway, and Sculptor. You can easily pile things out QUICKLY. It didn't take me long in this game to get a Highway in play, then a crowned Sculptor. From there, you can gain Crown to your hand, gaining a villager, and gain another Sculptor, then use the villager to play your new Crown on your new Sculptor, then rinse and repeat until those piles are empty. At this point I had a lead so the pile control was nice.

A similar, weaker trick is possible with Scepter. You end up only gaining the entire Scepter pile, but with all the villagers you stock up, you can either gun for 4 Hwy in play and then mass Sculpt/Scept your way into the provinces or you can drain any other pile and then hammer the duchies for a win.

For both this and the Crown variant, your big limitation will likely be draw, so be wary of this if you opponent can pile out with a win in one or two turns. That being said, if you can Sculpt draw (and with Hwy you can even use high cost draw) you can likely pile out pretty quickly.

Hilariously annoying/fun. Castles/Amb/Guardian or Lighthouse or Moat or Champion. Play Amb, other player either does not block (this turn or previously as applicable) which allows a return of Grand castle or they do which allows a one sided junking match. Continuously rebuying for points is strong, and crushingly so if there is any way to gain other cards during the turn. This gets very practical if you can get much more than ~7 VP in hand/play. Champion is just brutal. It becomes trivially easy to draw lots of VP and "not blocking" means basically committing to a much less reliable/efficient engine in the long run even if you can keep something like Wt in hand.

A more convoluted option would be use cost reducers, trash/gain with Graverobber or Rogue, but then you do not have to worry about the other player as much.

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but man I'm really appreciating the synergies of those two cards. Just finished a game where the opponent rushed Saunavanto while I went for the Sentry trashing route. Picked up an NV as well which really helped with the endgame - each time I bought a Province I managed to squirrel them away with my Native Village.

Support pieces: Rabble (for the draw) and Oasis (for discarding Provinces so they could be sent to the NV mat)

Scepter cannot let you generate a giant pile of +action as even Rc can manage if you really need a combo. Imp runs into trouble if you have few non-terminals. However, using Scepter on an Imp lets you play a lot of different terminal cards (e.g. I was running Tormenter/Masq/Bish/Envoy).

You can, of course get similar effects off Throne, Golem, etc. … but I was surprised by how versatile Imp/Scepter could be on an all terminal board.

Played with this the other day, the board had another village; it was nice to be able to ironworks a lackeys when I needed it to work as a village, and otherwise ironworks the village or something else.

Ironworks was nice as opposed to another workshop in this respect, as it didn't require me to use both villagers to get the village effect.